What happens next?

If you'd like to talk informally about what a website could do for you, please contact us via the email form on the Contact page (see above). If you decide to proceed, work on your new website will progress as follows:

First, we'll make sure that we thoroughly understand the purpose of your site. To establish this, we'll ask you a lot of questions and listen carefully to what you have to say about your needs and preferences. We prefer to do this via email, since it provides a record for both parties, but we can also arrange a telephone call or two. These discussions are included in the package.

At this stage, we'll will ask you for a 25% deposit. On receipt of the deposit, we'll register your new domain name or arrange for the transfer of your existing one (the transfer itself can be delayed until the new site is ready, so if you have an existing site it will remain operational until that point).

First draft

Once we have a clear idea of the look, feel and function that you want for your site, we'll begin work on a first draft. We may need to contact you with questions or ask you to look at design ideas and tell us what you think. At this stage we'll ask you to provide us with a first draft of the website's content (see 'What about content?' to the right of this page).

When a first working draft of your site is ready, we'll ask you to explore all its pages and functions and come back to us with a list of anything you would like us to change, add or remove. We'll make these changes (or, occasionally, explain why they are impossible or inadvisable), and then ask you to give the site another thorough check over. We would not expect to make further major design changes at this stage - those are covered in the previous step.

Going live

After any final tweaks, your site will go live. We'll provide you with step-by-step written instructions (pdf) for all the tasks you'll need to undertake on your site (e.g., adding and editing text and uploading images; using mailing list or contact form components), and for the next six weeks we'll provide you with as much free support as you need and put right any problems that arise as the site 'beds in'.

Joomla! websites are easy to maintain, but if you find that you need help not covered by your hosting and support package, we'll continue be available to make changes or perform additional maintenance at an hourly rate of £20.